Jesus' Family Bush

Epiphany 2 – Baptism of Jesus

January 13, 2013

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

 

I used to have a very orderly family tree.  I could tell you who my family members were, and how they related to me, even the sort of tenuous ones, like Sarabeth and Ashley, the daughters of my father’s cousin.  But then my mom died and dad got remarried to wonderful Paula, who has a whole family of her own, and things have gotten a little trickier.  Recently I baptized baby Owen here.  Owen is my step-mother’s step-daughter’s grandson.  Holden, coming from divorced and remarried parents with half-brothers and step-siblings, said, “Welcome to the club – now you have a family bush rather than a family tree!”  It’s not as easy to keep track of exactly how we all fit together anymore, and yet, I know that we do fit together.  It’s not exactly how I would have thought of family 10 years ago, and yet there it is – my family.  And I think that understanding helps me this morning.  But more on that later.

It’s the season of Epiphany, which in Greek means “to make known,” but the more common dictionary understanding is something closer to an “aha” moment.  Or, more precisely from my dictionary, “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something.”  The Gospel readings during the Epiphany season all center on a growing understanding of Jesus’ true identity as the Son of God.  (Or so I thought.)  

Last week we got the magi identifying Jesus as the King of the Jews.  Next week we’ll get Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana that “reveals his glory”, the two following weeks Jesus will unroll the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue and proclaim the prophecy fulfilled in their hearing, and finally the season will close with the transfiguration of Jesus and a voice from heaven saying “This is my Son, my chosen, listen to him.”

And then, of course, there is this morning’s baptism story that assures us of the God-ness of Jesus.  The sky breaks open and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove and God’s voice again booms out, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased!”  I’ve always seen this as a story about Jesus; a story included in the season of Epiphany because it makes clear exactly who Jesus is.  If there was any doubt before, all those details are included so we will know exactly who this is we’re dealing with.  The Son of God.  The Messiah.  God’s beloved.

This emphasis on how Jesus is being revealed to be the Son of God is all well and good and worthy of thinking about, but it just isn’t where my head has been.  I’m not done wrestling with the Christmas season, and the idea that in that baby born in Bethlehem we have a God who becomes incarnate, makes a home among us.  And so I read this morning’s Gospel with Christmas still firmly planted in my head and found it changed the way I read this baptism story.  This isn’t only an epiphany story because it makes known the essential nature of Jesus as the Son of God; it’s just as much an epiphany story because it makes known the essential nature of our God as one who comes among us as the human Jesus.

We don’t get it today (I don’t think we ever get it in church, because, frankly, it’s a little boring) but just after the baptism story this morning comes Luke’s genealogy for Jesus.  It connects Jesus’ lineage all the way from his father (“as was thought”) Joseph to the Bible biggies like King David, Jacob, Isaac, Abraham, Noah, and Adam, who, Luke notes, was “the son (with a little ‘s’) of God.”  

When I’ve read this genealogy in the past, I’ve found myself pretty cynical about it.  It seemed like a bit of a stretch to assert a lineage through Joseph while at the same time claiming Joseph wasn’t actually Jesus’ real father.  And then my second thought was always that it seemed a bit counter-productive to use a drawn out family tree to stress Jesus’ divine and royal lineage given the stress on Jesus as being something so different than a powerful-leader-of-the-world kind of king. 

But this time, I read this passage differently, partly because of what we’ve been reading recently with the Bible Challenge.  So many of these folks in Jesus’ lineage that are listed so proudly, the names that we revere as being our forebears in faith, the ones with whom God covenanted, the ones who handed down the promises to us, the ones who led the people of Israel for thousands of years – these are absurdly flawed people.  We’ve been reading through the beginning stories of Genesis and while I knew them already, I’d forgotten what a picture they paint when read all together of a creation run amok.  These are some pretty horrid individuals that God chooses to work through:

Abraham who was so weak and selfish that when he traveled through foreign lands he pretended his beautiful wife Sarah was his sister because that way the rulers wouldn’t feel like they had to kill him to get to her.  And no, they didn’t kill him; instead they assumed Sarah was fair game and took her for their own. 

Jacob who is constantly involved in trickery and also seems willing to sacrifice others to secure his own well being. 

And it’s no better as the line goes along.  King David was close to God and bravely fought Goliath, etc etc, but he also had one of his top soldiers purposefully killed in battle so he could cover up his own affair and impregnation of the soldier’s wife.  What is wrong with these people?  And what is wrong with God for choosing them for relationship?  For choosing them to be a light to draw all nations to God? 

And then it occurred to me that in the long list of names Luke sets out for Jesus’ family tree, maybe it isn’t a regal line that Luke is claiming for Jesus after all.  Maybe part of the point is that Jesus’ story is grounded in a motley crew.  Jesus has a family bush of his own.  He is born into a line of the saints and sinners of Israel – broken and human as can be.  His genealogy is tainted with the tragedy of humanity that has existed since the beginning of time.  It’s a living family tree that stretches to include … us.  We are those third cousins twice removed, the grand-nieces of a stepaunt, the half-brother’s brother-on-the-other-side’s grandkids.  It’s not always simple or clear, but we fit right in. 

That’s my epiphany for this week.

            God could have worked with only the very best of creation, or just turned God’s back on creation completely.  But that isn’t what happened.  God kept choosing humanity over and over again through the generations of Jesus’ forebears.  And in the incarnation, God makes that same choice, only on a much larger and more beautiful scale.

            God could have arrived on the scene as a fabulous king, fancy and rich with the multitudes bowing to him and obeying his every word rather than coming as a vulnerable, common-place baby.  God could have come using miraculous powers that would make himself grand rather than using those powers to lift up the lowly and sick.  God could have come and befriended only the righteous religious people, the clean healthy people, the people that didn’t take so much work instead of the outsiders and the friendless.  But that’s not what God chose to do.  God came among the people as Jesus and lived among the least and the lost.

            We see it again this morning in Jesus’ baptism story.  And again, because I’d just read this same story in Matthew for the Bible Challenge, I noticed something about this story in Luke that I’d never noticed before.  All four gospels tell about Jesus’ baptism.  All of them involve John the Baptist, all of them have some version of John talking about how One is coming who ranks ahead of him and will baptize with the Holy Spirit.  All of them have the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon Jesus after his baptism.  But Luke is the only story in which before his baptism Jesus is just part of the crowd.  From Luke’s Gospel: “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized….” 

            The other Gospel writers seem embarrassed by the fact that Jesus was baptized; they seem to be uncomfortable with the idea that Jesus would need baptism, being pure and fully God already.  And so they go out of their way to show John the Baptist trying to resist baptizing Jesus, or they include an aside from Jesus to imply that this is a box he needs to check for righteousness’ sake, or they make it look like only Jesus was baptized in the story so it seems more like a royal ordination than the dripping wet symbol of repentance and inclusion.

            But not in Luke’s version.  Jesus is baptized as one among many.  He gets in line with the rest of us messy imperfect humans.  He doesn’t cut to the front to get it done while the water is still clean, he doesn’t get some special super-duper-religious-person ritual, he doesn’t take over John’s role and lord his divinity over us, he doesn’t just stand on the edge observing our repentance, or give us lesser humans a hand as we exit the water shivering.  He stands with the crowd, along with all the people who are broken by the world and have given up hope.  He identifies with the damaged, longing people and he is baptized right along with us.  He exits the water, mud squishing through his toes, but somehow renewed and empowered to reach out in love to the world, just like we are, if we let ourselves be.  Jesus is one of us.  And that voice from heaven is meant for our ears too, as members of Jesus’ family bush: “You are my child,” says God, “my beloved; with you I am well-pleased.”  Amen.